New in the Gallery: 1963 Kahn’s Wieners Cards
June 11th, 2011 | Published in Autographs, New in the Gallery, Silly Stuff
It seemed like a good week to add another set of wiener cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. So I added 1963 Kahn’s Wieners, a set of 92 black-and-white cards distributed in the Cincinnati region by Kahn’s Meats. (Kahn’s is still in operation; it is now a Sara Lee company.)
All fourteen of the 1963 NFL teams are represented in the set, but the distribution of the cards among the teams is very uneven. I thought that the distribution might be related to how the teams finished in 1962, so I looked up the 1962 NFL standings. I found that, except for the Redskins, there is a strong correlation between the teams’ 1962 records and the number of players representing them in the 1963 Kahn’s set. Why so many Redskins? I dunno, maybe they were expected to do better in 1963. (They didn’t; they finished 3-11.)
| Team | 1962 Won-Lost-Tied | Number of 1963 Kahn’s Cards |
|---|---|---|
| Green Bay Packers | 13-1 | 14 |
| Washington Redskins | 5-7-2 | 14 |
| New York Giants | 12-2 | 11 |
| Pittsburgh Steelers | 9-5 | 10 |
| Cleveland Browns | 7-6-1 | 8 |
| Detroit Lions | 11-3 | 7 |
| Chicago Bears | 9-5 | 6 |
| St. Louis Cardinals | 4-9-1 | 5 |
| Baltimore Colts | 7-7 | 4 |
| San Francisco 49ers | 6-8 | 4 |
| Dallas Cowboys | 5-8-1 | 4 |
| Philadelphia Eagles | 3-10-1 | 3 |
| Minnesota Vikings | 2-11-1 | 2 |
| Los Angeles Rams | 1-12-1 | 2 |
Like earlier Kahn’s cards, the 1963 cards have facsimile signatures printed on them. However, as I pointed out in a previous article, at least some of the facsimile signatures are not in the players’ handwriting. The signature on the John Unitas card pictured here, for example, does not look like any of his autographs that appear in a Google image search. Most obvious is that on all of the items I found with his actual autograph, he signed his first name “Johnny,” not “John.”
Thanks again to Mike Ford, who provided the images for this set.
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